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User blog:Drew1200/How Should We Handle the 2015 Version?
Hello everyone, I'm a bit new here, but I've been on Wikia for several years, and I've become very interested in this wiki. There seems to be a fair amount of activity here, but I haven't seen much planning as to what the wiki will look like after the 2015 version of Farming Simulator is released. I had the same dilemma a couple years ago on the LEGO Message Boards Wiki, when there was a huge update for the topic of that wiki. We had to change nearly all of our articles to reflect the update, which was pretty much an entirely new site. The 2015 version of Farming Simulator reminds me a lot of that update, and the biggest thing I learned from my experience with the other update is that you do not want to go into something this significant without a good plan. So that's what this blog is for - I'd like to establish a plan as to how we'll be changing the articles in order to stay current with this new update. Obviously, we don't just want to delete all of the 2013 and 2014 information. It can become very difficult to organize information on different versions while still maintaining quality. There's a couple different ways this can be done, though. I'll explain them here. The first way, which I personally feel appears the most professional, is to create sub articles for all of the different years a specific vehicle or piece of equipment appeared in the game. From there, it's very easy to create a script that automatically detects what years we have articles for, and it can then display links to those articles wherever you place it on the page. This is the method we used on the other wiki I was telling you about. Here's an example of what I'm trying to explain (link). If you scroll down towards the bottom of the page, you'll see a blue and grey box that says "More Information". Right next to the title, it says "(Archive)". If you click on that link, it takes you to the archive page from before the update. This contains all the information we have available from prior to the update, whereas the main article is all of the current information. It would work basically the same way here. I'll give another example specific to this wiki: The Lindner Geotrac 94 appears in three versions of the game; 2013, 2014, and 2015. The main, current article would simply be the one I linked to - Lindner Geotrac 94. That would have information on whatever the newest version is, which (within a couple weeks), will be 2015. The subarticles would be located under the same title, but with the year in the name. So it could be Lindner Geotrac 94/2014, or 2014:Lindner Geotrac 94, or something else like that. The same would go for the 2013 version. Thus, if someone is looking for information on an older version of the game, they could easily be directed to the appropriate article. The other option is to simply place all of the information on the same page, with the newest towards the top, and the oldest towards the bottom. I've set up an example at User:Drew1200/Krone Emsland (just as a note, I'd like to include that template regardless of which of these two options we choose). The benefit of doing this is that all of the information is placed on the same page, which means the pages could potentially be longer, and there would be a smaller number of pages. However, there's also some downsides to this. First of all, it can be very repetitive, such as in the example I linked. Since the details of the trailer are just slightly different in every version, we have to list the details over and over again. In the 2014 version, it only supports three commodities, while in the 2013 version, it supports eight. Even though this information is very similar, we must give it once for every version the subject appears in. Of course, we'd have to do that either way, but there is a difference. When there's two or more separate articles, listing that information more than once isn't as big of a deal. After all, the goal of the first option would be for the researcher to immediately choose the version that he's researching. Everything would end up appearing far more clean and organized. Another downside to this type of setup is really almost the same thing. If you look at the example I set up, it looks like we tried to just cram a bunch of redundant information onto an article. I personally don't think it looks very clean or smooth. I think that's pretty much the theme of these two options. Option 1 looks much more professional aesthetically, although it requires more work, and a small sacrifice of functionality. Option 2, on the other hand, gives you all of your information in the same place, but at the cost of visual appearance. I think you could probably sense my bias in reading this, as I'm leaning much more towards the first option. I personally don't at all mind the additional work, and I think the very minimal sacrifice is very much worth how much more professional it appears. I'm willing to do whatever, though, so please just say what you think. :) Category:Blog posts